The Long Winding Road to Liberation: The Tales of Two Iranian Immigrants

ABSTRACT

In this article, we attempt to illuminate the unique and distinctive experiences of Iranian refugees and immigrants through the lens of our own autobiographical and phenomenological experiences as émigrés in two separate countries, the United States and Austria. We will draw from our own personal experiences of exile, occurring at different periods in Iran’s sociopolitical history, pre- and post-Islamic revolution, to elucidate our separate and different experiences of dislocation, adjustment, and acculturation. We will illustrate that, even with the starkly differentiated patterns of our cultural and religious immersions, we appeared to share elements of experience in adjusting and adapting to our host cultures. Psychoanalytic work offered us an experience of a surrogate motherland that bridged our cultural selfhoods. In particular, analytic work provided us with a tool and a cultural vehicle to accommodate our passage, facilitating our adaptation and acculturation, our senses of selfhood, and relational dimensions. We maintain that psychoanalysis helps by illuminating and loosening patterns of attachments to archaic cultural ties, or cultural pathological accommodation, thereby allowing for the development of an expanded version of cultural horizons.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• Iranian immigrants; exile; autobiography; cultural pathological accommodation; acculturation; adaptation; Iranian Psychoanalysis; Austrian refugees; Austrian psychoanalysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gita Zarnegar

Dr. Gita Zarnegar is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at ICP and currently in a private practice in Los Angeles, California. She is the co-founder of the Center for Authenticity (https://www.thecenterforauthenticity.com/).

Ahmad-Reza Mohammadpour-Yazdi

Ahmad-Reza Mohammadpour-Yazdi holds an MSc in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in psychotherapy. He is also a psychoanalysis candidate in Vienna. His research interests center on the issues of ideology, superego formation, extreme situations (like asylum and immigration), and Persian mythology within the context of the Skin Model of Ego Development (SMED).